Cherry Hill School Board Signs Off on Sustainability Initiative

By Bryan Littel. This story orginally appeared at http://cherryhill.patch.com/articles/cherry-hill-school-board-signs-off-on-sustainability-initiative

Officials from across multiple organizations, including township government and the school board, came together Tuesday night to sign off on a move toward education for sustainability.

Mayor Chuck Cahn, school board President Seth Klukoff, schools Superintendent Maureen Reusche, Sustainable Cherry Hill founder Lori Braunstein and Zone PTA President Lisa Saidel joined together on the joint resolution, which endorses the district’s commitment to education for sustainability.

Reusche hailed the resolution, which passed unanimously, as a historic move.

“Educating for sustainability broadens the lens through which we look at how the decisions we make and the actions we take impact the world around us,” she said.

The decision comes after several years of work between the grassroots Sustainable Cherry Hill, the township and the school district on some of the fundamental pieces—figuring out ways to make public buildings more energy-efficient, increasing recycling rates and lowering the amount of trash produced by the schools and government, among others.

The move to tackle education as part of the effort is just the next step, Braunstein said.

“It’s more of a public commitment to working together,” she said. “We want to be able to look our kids in the eye in 20, 50 years and be able to say we did everything we could so they had a high quality of life.”

That effort needs to extend to students in the school district, Braunstein said, in order to better prepare them for a changing world.

“We need to teach our kids to think differently,” she said. “The jobs that are out there are different, the challenges that the kids are going to need to solve are different—they’re going to have different goals and visions than we did…we really need to be able to prepare our kids.”

That means getting students to recognize connections in what they’re learning, whether that’s how learning from history can help influence the future, or real-world applications from math class, said Jaimie Cloud, founder of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, who is currently working with the district’s middle schools in the effort.“We want kids to see how all the disciplines hang together,” she said.

The resolution is somewhat nebulous—it talks about “development of curricular, instructional and organizational learning practices necessary for students to meet the Standards and Performance indicators of Education for Sustainability, especially those opportunities presented by New Jersey Learns,” though it doesn’t offer much specifically on what that might translate to in terms of any changes to the curriculum.

That vagueness is, to a degree, by design, Cloud said, and added that they’re not advocating any radical changes.

And as several board members pointed out, any changes to the curriculum would have to pass muster with both the district’s administrators and the school board.

“The administration and the board are firmly in control of the curriculum—this program is simply meant to foster opportunities for continued discussion and work in the schools,” policy and legislation chair Steve Robbins said. “Frankly, given what I know, the critical thinking skills that are being taught—especially in our middle schools—I am fairly confident the pros and cons will be discussed.”

Learn more about The Cloud Institute's NJ Schools Learn Program: /new-jersey-learns

Educating for Sustainability with the Brain in Mind

Useful Tips and Principles for Educating for Sustainability - notes by Jaimie P. Cloud adapted from the work of David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz.

Create a Shared Understanding

A shared experience, shared understanding, and shared vocabulary within the organization or group of people you are working with will save you a lot of time. That statement couldn’t be truer in relation to our work to Educate for Sustainability. Don’t assume that everyone has the same understanding of what sustainability is, why it is important, or what it means to educate for it.

Understand How Our Brains Process New Learning

Our brains need a rationale in order to learn new things and to make new and sustained cognitive connections (make things stick). We all learn on a “need to know” basis. To encourage our participants to develop a rationale for educating for sustainability, we begin our workshops by asking them, “Why educate for sustainability?” Their initial rationale is a useful entry point through which we can engage our audience. If they don’t have a rationale yet, asking them to think of one “primes the brain” for learning.

As part of rationale building, people need to first be able to identify what is un- sustainable about their current practices and our current global reality (un-sustainability). Once they learn this, they will be able to understand why it is necessary to learn about what sustainability is. Then they can move to thinking about what it will take to make the shift toward practices that contribute to a sustainable future.

At the end of the Introduction to Education for Sustainability Workshop we ask people again to address the question, “Why educate for sustainability?” We do this for a few reasons. First, we are interested in growth and changes in thinking. Second, we want to make sure that each participant has a personal rationale for Education for Sustainability by the end of the day. Third, we collect rationales over time as a way to predict and teach to the entry points and rationales that are most likely to be present in new audience groups as a way to be learner centered even before we know our learners.

Know Your Terminology

Different fields have different names for the same basic premise: our thinking drives our behavior and our behavior causes results. Here is some of the terminology from the fields we draw on: Mental Models (Systems Thinking); Mental Maps (Neuroscience); Paradigms (Innovation); an Accepted Premise (Rhetoric); and Frames/ Framing (Cognitive Linguistics); “In the box” Thinking (Design); and Schema (Education). Popular terms used for the same concept include worldview or frame of reference. The phrase, “Right Thinking, Right Action” also describes this idea well. Thinking about our thinking is the most “upstream” place we can intervene in order to make transformative personal, organizational, and societal change. The thinking itself comes next.

Ask Permission to Shift People’s Paradigms

The shift toward sustainability and regeneration will require new and different thinking. We liken the shift to the Copernican Revolution. No matter who your target audience is, its members are most likely still operating in the “old paradigm” (most people are). Before playing The Fish Game or any transformative learning experience with adults, ask permission to cause new learning which could “shift their existing paradigm(s)”.

Piaget called learning something that reinforces your existing schema “assimilation.” He called learning something new that requires shifting your schema to understand it “accommodation”. We call it paradigm shifting or “out of the box” thinking. The reason we ask people for permission to “leave their comfort zone” is because being explicit about it both primes the brain for learning and reduces resistance (impasse) which provides a safe space for the brain to “re-frame” or “re-appraise”—literally “re-wire”—in order to make new cognitive connections (create new maps/neuro-pathways).

“Changing circuitry” (creating conditions for learning/paradigm shifting) makes it possible for people to pay attention to, and literally see, different aspects they could not perceive before. They can and do pay attention to things they could not—and therefore did not—pay attention to before.

Understand What Triggers Tremendous Learning and What Triggers No Learning At All

We want to create a learning environment where people feel comfortable and safe to learn, to change, to think “out of the box”, and to grow. Shifting people’s paradigms is disruptive and potentially threatening for people. We have found “SCARF”, a brain based model for collaborating with and influencing others very useful in ensuring that tremendous learning takes place in our programs. Developed by David Rock, Author and Founder of the Neuro-Leadership Institute, SCARF is a useful acronym to remember if you want to create the conditions for tremendous learning (“the “toward” response) to take place in your participants, and to avoid no learning at all or “the away” response.

TREMENDOUS LEARNING (The “Toward Response”) Takes Place When People Experience:

STATUS: Status refers to a person’s self esteem, perceived status, position, and/or personal best. How can we connect sustainability, learning and new thinking to our participants’ increased status?

CERTAINTY: The brain likes certainty. Uncertainty is perceived by the brain as a death threat. In uncertain times, focusing on principles and things that you can count on is critical. Make a case for why education for sustainability provides us with more certainty and things that we can count on than does our current reality. We tend to hang on to what we know because it is impossible to predict the future and we need to exist in a “known” state even if this is just our perception.

AUTONOMY: Autonomy is a person’s perceived ability to choose (e.g. “veto power” = free “won’t” and free “will”), a sense that what I do matters. Moving toward a sustainable future will preserve our ability to choose wisely. Continuing down the unsustainable road we are on will reduce our options. Many people confuse sustainable practices with a loss of autonomy. It is important for people to connect making responsible and sustainable choices with their autonomy.

RELATEDNESS: Relatedness is the perception that I am among friends, trust and fairness are assumed, and I have a desire to be connected/to belong. Creating learning communities, communities of practice, or geography of interest gives people a sense of belonging and connectedness to one another. We can help each other make the shift toward sustainability.

FAIRNESS: Fairness is a person’s perception of what’s honest, just and equitable. We are “hardwired” to pay attention to fairness and justice because we depend on one another in our groups. Ironically, fairness only applies to “us” not to “them.” Emphasizing that in the context of interdependence, there is no “them”, helps people extend their need for fairness and justice globally and across generations.

The “toward” response reinforces new insights and new “re-wiring” by connecting to previous knowledge. As a facilitator, help people connect new ideas and new thinking to things they already know so they are reminded that they have a foundation on which they can attach the new thinking.

The Result: Much more is possible in the “toward” state; more creativity, greater capacity for problem solving, and more energy.

CONVERSELY, NO LEARNING takes place when the “away” response is triggered. The “away” response takes place when people:

• Cannot make connections to previous knowledge (this causes anxiety, tiredness, uncertainty, and is threatening and causes retreat)

• Feel no sense of autonomy (no choices, no agency)

• Do not feel part of the group (among foes, no empathy distrust and unfairness assumed)

• Status Threatened (left out, challenged/questioned, not respected, not valued)

The Result: Much less is possible in the “away” state; loss of attention, loss of focus, distracted, fuzzy thinking, and anger.

Be Prepared To Regulate Emotional Responses

An audience will have emotional responses to what you are saying. This will vary depending on whether they are in the “Away” state or the “Toward” state. By tuning into their feelings you will be able to know what is needed to flip an “Away” response into a “Toward” response. People need to express their thinking so they can evolve it. Expression is the first step to moving from current reality to new learning. A gesture of empathy and/or respectful and timely humor can serve as comic relief for people who are in or passing through the “uncomfortable zone”.

Use A Learner Centered Approach

A learner centered approach assures that people can develop expertise which increases their status, allows them to make connections, demonstrates their relatedness and celebrates their autonomy. Self generated information is remembered best. Ask guiding questions that help your audiences to come to their own understanding and drive their own inquiry.

Concentrate On What We Want

When we concentrate on what we don’t want it embeds those things even more into our thinking. Suppression makes us unhappy, impedes memory, and makes us feel bad.

Instead, concentrate on what we do want so we can re-wire toward that. Re-appraisal/Paradigm-shifting/ Re-framing/ Re-wiring/Lateral Thinking all change our interpretation, so it makes us happy, makes it possible to remember and it allows us to find comfort in the new interpretation. The kinds of things that contribute to making it possible for people to “re-frame” or shift to a new way of thinking include: transformative experiences; asking different questions; activating the creative process; telling stories or providing case studies and exemplars; empathizing; changing perspective; reflective thinking; reading the feedback; and mindfulness.

Be Mindful and Create Conditions for Mindfulness

Mindfulness is required when open “mindedness”, new learning, and new behaviors are required. Attention, intention, focus, consciousness, and choices (veto power) are essential in order to create different results. Before we can employ “free will,” we often need to employ “free won’t.” It is our decision not to continue thinking and behaving in the old way that makes the space for the new thinking/behavior.

Provide Enough Time

Make sure you have left enough time for new learning to be applied so it has a chance to sink in and be reinforced before participants leave the program. Encourage low stakes application of new learning before high stakes application. Provide enough time to be able to adequately debrief difficult concepts so that people do not leave with too much uncertainty or ambiguity. This could backfire and reinforce their “old” thinking. Sometimes, this means that “less is more.” On the other hand, avoid feeling the need to answer all the questions people are asking and be happy that they are being generated as a result of your facilitation.

The adult learning curve—from awareness to trial and error (mostly error) to internalization or being “hardwired”— is three to five years. Mastery is never finished.

Balance Authority with Humility

We must be authoritative enough to keep our participants in the “toward state” and humble enough to generate new and better thinking among the collective that goes beyond what we alone have already learned. There is no such thing as an expert in the field, and we are no exception.

Why Are We Doing This?

Our job is to create the conditions for people (including us) to learn and to continue to learn. We want people to ask better questions than the ones they came in with—and even better questions than the ones we are asking. We need to create new knowledge and understanding as a result of our work—that is what is required.

Donate fresh food? There's an app for that, coming soon from a N.J. man - and former New Jersey Learner! (By Eunice Lee)

Reposted from: http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/10/donate_fresh_food_theres_an_ap.html

Livingston resident and volunteer Chris Bickel knows what it's like to go hungry. He spent eight months homeless as a teenager. Tim Farrell/ The Star-Ledger.

ESSEX COUNTY — Want to donate more fresh food to your local pantry? Talk to Livingston resident Chris Bickel — he is working on an app for that.

An active volunteer with local pantries and the first townwide Food Day coming up on Wednesday, Bickel is raising funds to build a mobile app that’s a new twist on old-fashioned giving to food banks.

His app idea, which has gained traction with local pantries, basically creates a "virtual refrigerator" on your smart phone or tablet. The app makes it possible to donate money for healthful foods or actually select the foods — tomatoes, green beans, a dozen eggs.

"The fresh stuff is really what’s going to make people feel better," he said.

Eileen Sweeny, coordinator of Pantry Partners for United Way of Northern New Jersey, has been in talks with Bickel about developing the app and believes it will increase healthier options in pantries beyond Livingston.

If the donor gives money, the donation will be sent directly to the designated pantry or soup kitchen for purchasing fresh food. If the donor purchases, say, two bags of apples or three heads of lettuce, it will be delivered directly to the designated charity by participating stores. Several grocers already have expressed interest, Bickel said.

"I think it has enormous potential," said Sweeny, noting that three years ago United Way began its own push for more items like whole wheat pasta or low-sodium canned vegetables. "It could change what’s in food pantries and soup kitchens across the country."

The app will also feature a dashboard that shows in real time what a charity’s greatest needs are using charts and graphs. Bickel said he needs to raise a few thousand dollars to get the app professionally developed.

Livingston volunteer Chris Bickel knows what it's like to go hungry. He spent eight months homeless as a teenager.

Bickel knows what it’s like to go hungry. Growing up in Ventnor, he was the second youngest of eight children in a household where food stamps put meals on the table. At 16, he was homeless for about eight months and was helped by an English teacher and his rowing coach.

Now the supervisor of social studies for Livingston Public Schools, Bickel, 43, serves as the district’s liaison to the township’s Food Day Committee — which has organized events throughout the month to celebrate healthful food and raise hunger awareness — and has become one of its biggest advocates. On Oct. 14, volunteers including Bickel and the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse filled a school bus full of donated goods for a series of "Stuff The Bus" events around Essex County.

Many times, hunger is a silent problem in suburbia. "Sue," a 48-year-old Livingston resident, is one example. As a working single mom of three, she struggles to make ends meet and receives food from St. Philomena’s pantry. She did not want to give her name.

The economy hit her family hard when her husband, whom she is separated from, had his salary cut in half. That, in turn, slashed the child support she receives.

"My kids are happy with a box of pasta," she said, but as a mother she wants to give them more. "Food is definitely an expense, and I’m trying to make sure they get chicken and all the stuff that they should be getting."

"The money they do have they’re using on taxes or their mortgage, and (residents) scrimp on food," said Sister Barbara Howard of St. Philomena’s, which has partnered with Bickel.

And it’s not easy to rely on food pantries in a well-to-do town like Livingston.

"We live in a town where people have two, three homes or vacation in Mexico every break or get a car on their 17th birthday," the single mom said.

To contact Bickel or support his effort to create an app, send an e-mail message to bicman7@yahoo.com.

Learn more about the Cloud Institute's New Jersey Learns Program: /new-jersey-learns

Systems Thinking Leads to Long-Term View For Students at Trevor Day School (By Grant Lichtman)

Reposted from: http://learningpond.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/systems-thinking-leads-to-long-term-view-for-students-at-trevor-day-school/

Teaching context, the weaving together of content, is more powerful than teaching content alone. But teaching context to our students allows them to understand that one set of contextual relationships. Teaching them the skills of how to acquire context allows them to develop context on their own for the rest of their lives. This is the challenge of teaching students to become life-long self-evolving learners. It is hard. For years I have been looking for a school or set of educators who do this overtly, not assuming that through a generally good education their students will acquire these skills, but actually teaching them alongside the other critical skills of education like reading, and writing and math. If you are interested in how a school is teaching students to be systems thinkers, to both understand and create their own long term perspectives, read on.

Trevor Day School is a multi-campus New York City preK-12, and I only got to visit with the elementary division, but I also got to spend a lot of time with their two educational leaders, veteran Head Pam Clarke and Assistant Head Lisa Alberti. They told me that Trevor has had some rough patches in its history, including the difficult merger of two schools. They also have a cultural history of self-reflection. Their teacher conferences, even at the lowest grade levels, have always been organized around a student-teacher meeting to set goals, followed by a student-teacher-family conference to review performance and talk about how the student-set goals can best be achieved. Recently they have undertaken the departmental reviews by external teams that so many schools find helpful in revising curriculum and teaching methods. Trevor takes advantage of their location and invites university experts in along with K-12 colleagues on these reviews. They filter the reviews and reports to steer changes along pathways that are consistent with their mission. As we discussed, all ideas are not good ideas, or good for the time, and many schools fail to take the important step of filtering out change for the sake of change.

The exciting takeaway from Trevor is that they are intentionally teaching the skills of systems thinking in order to truly instill an understanding of longitudinal perspective in the students. The details that follow are mostly from the lower grades, and Pam and Lisa were clear that this mindset has not migrated completely upwards to the upper grades. But is it moving as the students bring these understandings with them.

Systems thinking is the core set of skills that allows students to understand complex relationships, which, of course, are at the heart of the complicated world in which we live. (Full disclosure of bias: they are also at the heart of my teaching and book, The Falconer. If you are interested, look to the right of this page and check it out; you can download the intro for free.) Many believe that we can’t teach these skills at a young age; they have been at the top of Bloom’s taxonomy and we have incorrectly thought that we have to teach all the lower parts of Bloom before students can get to the top. (See my post on Flipping and Doubling Bloom.) Trevor is proving we can teach these skills, and that, as with all skills, it is critical to have a multi-year, integrated sequence of exposure and practice.

As with many of the other schools I have visited, it was clear to me that none of this would have happened without the highly intentional direction and support of Head Pam Clarke. She is not only a strong and dynamic leader, but also a keen academician who has been a leader in what we call 21C since well before the dawn of this young century. Getting faculty to collaborate along all-school pathways is never easy and Pam had to put people and processes into the “right places on the bus” in order to get the pieces moving in coordination. She is also a supporter of teaching systems thinking, which is a key, if not the key, to so much of the cross-grade collaboration that is deeply rich with what we call 21C skills.

We visited a 2^nd grade class that is studying plant biology. The teacher was using a Venn diagram to introduce the system of nutrients (sun, water, soil) required for plant germination. The second graders not only learned and understood the use of Venn, but they independently saw how to solve for missing nutrients in a scientific experiment. Our visit ended with the students and teachers huddled on the floor, placing seed pots into the spaces of the Venn relative to their upcoming experiments. Venn diagrams are a tool, but they also represent a mindset, both of which can be extrapolated in the future to more complex, multi-variable systems. Trevor extends this long-term view of the world through its off-campus relationships, including a forest conservation and biodiversity project in upstate New York, and with ongoing research projects in Central Park and on the Hudson River:

• 1^st graders have a 2.5-hour block of time in Central Park every week to research and collect data on plants that are revisited every year to compile and compare longitudinal data.
• 2^nd graders study the system of trees, and adopt and research individual trees in the Park.
• 3^rd graders research and collect field data on the Hudson, and participate in a major Snapshot day where many university researchers collect and compile data on the ecology and health of the river.
• 5^th graders study the local marsh communities, and fold environmental indicators in to their study of economics.
• 7^th graders study biodiversity indicators including salamander populations in the Black Rock Forest.

Through these programs, the students develop a common language of what it means to have a long view of the world around us. They prescribe to Jaimie Clouds ideas of common and shared resources and try to understand their own world, from the classroom to their areas of study, within this context.

Lisa told me they do not see the choice that stresses some schools between being “rigorous” and being “supportive”. Support is a core part of the culture demonstrated in their use of space, as they have Common Time and a Common Room that is a core for each group of grade level classes. Teacher’s desks are in these Common Rooms; students can find help and a place to work, and the teachers have dedicated time for collaboration and a place to meet.

I wish I had time to visit the other divisions at Trevor, but my dance card was full! It was exciting to see intentional systems thinking instruction, even at the youngest ages validating much of my assumptions about teaching these critical skills to our students. Now, my only worry is that Pam is an expert editor and proof reader and she is sure to find some typos or errors in this post!

EfS Curriculum Design & The Cloud Approach - FAQ's

Jaimie Cloud answers the most frequently asked questions about EfS curriculum design and the Cloud approach.

Q. Is this another “add on”? Where am I going to get the time? I am swamped as it is! I have no more time in my day or in my curriculum! A. No. Education for a sustainable future is not an “add on”. It is education that contributes to the future we want. Educating for an unsustainable future doesn’t make any sense—no matter how much time you have or don’t have. Don’t think of the curriculum as a crowded room that people keep trying to stuff more and more things into. Think of the curriculum as a rich colorful garden. The richer and the more productive the better—and it all happens within the same amount of time and space. Here are some useful analogies: When you add children or new friends to your life, your day does not get longer. You re-orient your day. You consolidate. You integrate. You prioritize. You accomplish more than one goal at a time… . When you add a new vocabulary word to your lexicon, your head does not get bigger. In fact, your sentences often get shorter, because finding a precise way to say something is more efficient and more effective, and therefore saves time.

Tap the power of limits. When you embed the attributes of EfS into your curriculum through “backwards design”, the learning is precise, authentic, effective, applicable, sticky, engaging, transferable and causes more and varied cognitive connections to be made. It takes time up-front to re-orient the curriculum—that is certainly true, and it saves more time over time, increases student achievement and civic participation, produces happy teachers, improves school culture and contributes to sustainable community indicators (citations). If you are already achieving all those outcomes consistently over time, you are already educating for sustainability and by all means keep doing what you are doing. If not, educate for sustainability. The goal: Healthy and sustainable communities in which our children can reach their individual and collective potential. The means: Education for Sustainability. Next question?

Q. The science teachers already teach about the environment. Why do we have to do this too? A. EfS is not about the environment. It is not even about sustainability, and it is certainly not about the indicators of un-sustainability (pollution, destruction of rainforests, etc.). EfS is education for a healthy, vibrant and sustain-able future for generations to come. It is completely interdisciplinary and includes the “hard” sciences, the arts and humanities and a great number of social sciences. After all, we are the ones who need to learn how to live sustainably on the planet. Education of any kind always yields results. The “learned curriculum” includes “the hidden curriculum” as well as the explicit one. Why not be intentional about the future we want by explicitly educating for it?

Q. How can I educate for sustainability when I have to teach to the test? A. Standardized tests are an indicator of student achievement. They are not the goal of a great education. The more you manage the indicators, the harder and harder it will be to achieve them and you will create new problems by doing so. (It mimics the “Shifting the Burden Archetype” in System Dynamics literature in which the symptom is addressed in the short run, but over time, becomes worse and worse and creates new problems.) In addition, standardized tests measure 13% of the Content and Performance Standards students must meet (Martin-Kniep). Having said that, there is growing evidence that educating for sustainability increases student achievement, and achievement measured by standardized tests (citations). Educators for Sustainability rely on State and Common Core Standards as base knowledge and skills into which we embed the attributes of EfS. If your students are meeting the Standards by being educated for sustainability, it will increase their chances of doing fine on the tests AND it will increase their chances and future generations’ chances to thrive over time. EfS solves more than one problem at a time and minimizes the creation of new problems. That makes it a sustainable innovation for schools.

Q. Can you walk me through what it looks like when all the parts of the EfS framework are implemented? A. Yes. We have a tool called the EfS Reality Check that we designed for this purpose. You can find the beta version at http://efsrealitycheck.cloudinstitute.org/. It will be revised again this year so stay tuned. In a nutshell, we begin by inviting a representative group of stakeholders in the school community (everyone or a sub group—depending on the school) to attend an introduction to sustainability and education for sustainability.

The introduction is designed to:

1. Develop a shared understanding and vocabulary

2. Give everyone a chance to develop a personal rationale for educating for sustainability

3. Inspire everyone to be hopeful about the role of teaching and learning in making the shift toward sustainability.

Then we invite a First Cohort of educators to innovate (sustainablize) units of study and to produce exemplars that other educators in the community can see. That is how we get Cohorts Two, Three and so on. There are designers, adapters and deliverers in every building. We work with them all at the appropriate levels of engagement. While we are regularly working with the faculty who are ready and able to innovate curriculum, we are also working with administrators to help them create the policies and practices necessary for the school to become a learning organization that educates for sustainability.

Q. What do we need to know, be able to do and be like if we are to contribute to our ability to thrive over time? How can we ensure that our students are being educated for sustainability? A. Complete an inquiry online, or call The Cloud Institute directly 212-645-9930.

I hope this list of common questions and our anwers has been useful to you.

Jaimie P. Cloud, Founder and President
The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education

Citations

• Academy for Educational Development (2007). An evaluation of the Cloud Institute’s “Business and Entrepreneurship Education for the 21st Century” and Inventing the Future curricula. Washington: AED.

• Barrat Hacking, E., Scott, B., and Lee, E. (2010). Evidence of impact of sustainable schools. Bath, U.K.: University of Bath, Center for Research in Education and the Environment. Downloaded April 16, 2010 from http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/00344-2010BKT-EN.pdf

• Duffin, M., Murphy, M., & Johnson, B. (2008). Quantifying a relationship between place-based learning and environmental quality: Final report. Woodstock, VT: NPS Conservation Study Institute in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency and Shelburne Farms. 

• Duffin, M., & PEER Associates (2007). Why use place-based education? Four answers that emerge from the findings of PEEC, the Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative, (Presentation version). Retrieved on May 10, 2011 from http://www.peecworks.org/PEEC/PEEC_Reports/S01248363-0124838. 

• Sobel, D. (2008). Nature and children: design principles for educators. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers

• Ofsted, The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (2009) Education for Sustainable Development: Improving Schools - Improving Lives. Manchester, UK. Crown http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/education-for-sustainable-development-improving-schools-improving-lives
  

• Gayford Christopher (2009) Learning for Sustainability: from the pupils’ perspective. Godalming, Surrey: World Wide Fund for Nature http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/wwf_report_final_web.pdf

Green Ribbon School Awards | Denver Green School & EfS

Green Ribbon School Awards

We are proud to congratulate our clients and partner schools who each received the 2012 Green Ribbon School Award this year. "Schools that take a green approach cut costs on their utility bills, foster healthy and productive classrooms, and prepare students to thrive in the 21st century economy," said Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "These Green Ribbon School award winners are taking outstanding steps to educate tomorrow's environmental leaders, and demonstrating how sustainability and environmental awareness make sense for the health of our students and our country."

U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools (ED-GRS) is a federal recognition program that opened in September 2011. Honored schools exercise a comprehensive approach to creating "green" environments through reducing environmental impact, promoting health, and ensuring a high-quality environmental and outdoor education to prepare students with the 21st century skills and sustainability concepts needed in the growing global economy.

The 78 awarded schools were named winners from among nearly 100 nominees submitted by 30 state education agencies, the District of Columbia and the Bureau of Indian Education. More than 350 schools completed applications to their state education agencies. Among the list of winners are 66 public schools, including 8 charters, and 12 private schools. In total, the schools are composed of 43 elementary, 31 middle and 26 high schools with around 50 percent representing high need, and at-risk schools.

We would like to acknowledge:

Hawaii Preparatory Academy, Kamuela, Hawaii
The Willow School, Gladstone, New Jersey
Gladstone High School, Gladstone, Oregon
Tahoma Junior High School, Tahoma, Washington
The Denver Green School, Denver, Colorado

We would like to give a special shout out to our most recent and youngest school partner, the Denver Green School (DGS) because 2012 marked the end of their second year as a Denver Public School. DGS is a Neighborhood Innovation School in southeast Denver – meaning they implement their own unique program design, approved through a rigorous process by the Denver Public School Board. The innovation they proposed was Education for Sustainability. Their emphasis on project-based learning allows teachers and students to engage in relevant, self-directed, teacher-facilitated learning. DGS refers to the current national "Green Movement"- but they also believe that "green" has a deeper meaning. They believe that green must mean a focus on the whole student and the whole community. 

Apparently the Denver Public Schools (DPS) agrees, and so do the test scores. DGS was also recently awarded the DPS’s “green school” designation—which in that context means that DGS met and exceeded the DPS’s expectations for academic achievement this year. Of course, at the heart of their success, is their focus on carbon footprint reduction and on environmental and social sustainability. Think deep dark green squared! Next year DGS will complete their growth as a Pre-K-8 school at 550 students. 

The Cloud Institute began working with the leaders and faculty partners of DGS one year before they opened their doors. They did it right. Even though almost everyone coming to work at DGS had another job that year, by the time the school opened, the team was ready. Every year the faculty has worked with the Cloud Institute to design, document and map curriculum aligned with State, Common Core and EfS Standards, and the faculty has worked tirelessly to produce learner centered instruction that educates for the future we want, while administering assessments that produce learning.

Additional highlights from the first two years include the ongoing study of the rights to, and responsibilities for tending the Commons by the Pre-School students, an energy audit and reduction of energy consumption led by the second graders, and the small group of 6th graders that facilitated our fish game simulation to 75 US Green Building Council Members in the first year (with the usual results). This year, another group of 6th graders determined that DGS has used ONE MILLION gallons of water a year LESS since it opened (with hundreds of people in the building and a CSA Farm on the property run by their partner Sprout City Farms) then it did when it was unoccupied for the several years before it opened. That is what we call contributing to the regenerative capacity of a place. Elegant curriculum and instruction, co-leadership, faculty partners, community involvement—THIS is the new paradigm. It works. 

It gives us great pleasure once again, to honor the Denver Green School, Hawaii Prep Academy, The Willow School, Gladstone High School, Tahoma Junior High School and all the other winners of the 2012 Green Ribbon Schools Award for their contribution to a healthy and sustainable future for us all.

Reflections on ‘Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining a New Economic Paradigm’. By Jaimie Cloud

On April 2nd of this year I attended a meeting at the U.N. Hosted by The Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bhutan, Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley entitled, ‘Happiness and Wellbeing: Defining a New Economic Paradigm’.  Bhutan is famous for developing the Gross National Happiness Index, a stunning measure of sustainable development that  takes a holistic approach towards notions of progress and gives equal importance to both economic as well as  non-economic aspects of wellbeing.   In attendance at the full day meeting were,  Her Excellency Ms. Laura Chinchilla, President of the Republic of Costa Rica,  H.E. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, our U.S. based friends and colleagues Mathis Wackernagel (The Ecological Footprint), Bob Costanza (Ecological Economist and  Professor and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions (ISS) at Portland State University), Hunter Lovins (Co-Author, Natural Capitalism) and Gifford Pinchot (Bainbridge Graduate Institute), and the list goes on. It was thrilling to see and hear so many important dignitaries talking about the need for alternative indicators to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and about re-thinking what we really want and how to measure what really counts.  The Cloud Institute and other educators for sustainability have been educating young people and educators about that since 1995.

It was an amazing event and I was very proud to be included in the conversation.  I would have loved to see a public figure from the field of PreK-12 Education for Sustainability included in a panel.  It is, however,  not uncommon for the leaders of  professional sectors engaged in the shift toward sustainability (business, economics, government, higher education, architecture and design) to inadvertently leave out the Pre-K-12 Education sector in their deliberations.  It is a commonly held belief that Pre-K-12 education requires a twenty year return on investment period—in other words, that it will take twenty years before the children who are educated for sustainability will grow up and make a difference that can contribute to sustainability.  This, of course, is not true.  It is, in fact, the children and young people who are educated for sustainability that are “making the difference that makes the difference” (Gregory Bateson) right now.  They have everything to gain from the new paradigm and everything to lose in the old one.  They get that more than most. See our Inspiring Kids section for evidence.

Working documents and frameworks from the initiative and from the meeting:

http://www.www.2apr.gov.bt
http://www.2apr.gov.bt/images/stories/pdf/unresolutiononhappiness.pdf
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/2012/World%20Happiness%20Report.pdf
http://www.gnhusa.org

Jaimie Cloud Presents at Amy Greenwell Garden in Hawaii

by Donna Mitts
(Reposted from: http://kohalacenter.org/schoolgardensblog/?p=803)

On January 10, 2012 school garden teachers along with others were fortunate enough to listen to Jaimie Cloud present at the Amy Greenwell Garden in Captain Cook. Jaimie is a visionary leader in sustainable education.  The Cloud Institute “prepares K-12 school systems and their communities to educate for a sustainable future by inspiring educators and engaging students through meaningful content and learner-centered instruction.”
 
Through discussion and exercises in sustainability participants learned valuable tactics in teaching sustainability to others.  This was a wonderful presentation enhanced by the beauty of the Amy Greenwell Garden.

We Are All In This Together, by Dr. Moira N. Wilkinson

You’ve likely heard that phrase before; it’s a common enough idea with lots of variations on the theme: “All for one and one for all!” “The more the merrier!” to name just a couple. We might get so used to hearing it that we tune out to its full significance.

It’s more than a sound bite or a fun thing to imagine. It is, in fact, a Mental Model of Sustainability. I am totally on board with the goal and still stumble sometimes putting it into action consistently. I’m struck by how hard it is to retrain my brain to shift toward that new way of thinking. Even doing this work full-time, when push comes to shove, sometimes I revert to doing things on my own; which is ironic because it’s precisely when things get hardest that it’s MOST important to bring in your crew.

Inevitably, when the moment passes, I’m left with two conclusions: a) it’s not nearly as fun as it would have been if I’d been doing it with folks along the way, and b) the product would have looked different, and maybe better. Don’t get me wrong—I love the way my mind works and the creative things it thinks of – the thing is I like the way ALL minds work and that each comes up with different responses. So I'm always left wondering, “what if….” How much more creative and win-win the product (insights and responses to the same issue) might have been with more fabulous minds working on it with me? We know that asking different questions and activating the creative process are two good strategies for shifting mental models, so I’ll pose the same questions to you that I ask myself in this situation. Think about them. See what YOU come up with!

What would it mean to our work if we took it to heart that we are all in this together—truly? In a world where we are all in this together there is no “they” only “we.” If we act on the principle of being in this together, how differently would we draw on the support and resources that we offer each other in the NJ Learns Community? What would change in the way we approach the people we want to influence—especially those we seem most UNlike or with whom we disagree the most? (Yes, THAT person.) How would this change your life, or the face of the community you live in, now and in the future?

We’re all still learning how to put this into action and there’s no single correct way to do it. Everyone’s got a good story about how this goes for them, the highs and lows. Check out the story below to get a window into the work of our Hillsborough team to see how they’re working together to build a broad foundation in their town.

In the last four years, sustainability has become a part of everyday language for more and more people. There is more mainstream information and acceptance about the causes of unsustainability, and more resources, like Sustainable Jersey, to help individuals and communities learn about behavior changes that contribute to sustainability. As a result, over the years, the number of applicants to the NJ Learns program has increased three-fold, and the quality of applicants has improved notably. Applicants are clearer in their motivation for doing this work, have diversified teams, and are more organized in their ability to take strategic action toward their visions.

The Hillsborough team is an example of that. Their five person team is comprised of two self-identified “concerned residents” (one of whom is a parent of school-aged children), a School Board Member, a business person, and a public school teacher. This mixed team is an example of how the Keystone Year seeds change on an organizational level by bringing individuals and teams from schools and communities to learn and change together for the shared goal of sustainability. They joined NJ Learns for several reasons, among them that they have strong ties with Sustainable Jersey and had heard Winnie Fatton from Sustainable Jersey talk about the transformational changes that can occur after a team experiences the NJ Learns program.

According to Bill Dondiego, the team’s vision was always about “awareness and support.” At the outset of the Keystone Year, the team had their sights set on systemic change in the town, working together to expand people’s understanding of sustainability to include an awareness that thinking, learning, and education have a role in the shift toward sustainability. Children and young people are pivotal players in this vision. As Bill put it, the “Start young, so they know and respect the Commons. If they respect the Commons, they’ll respect each other.” To that end, each team member is working from their particular place in the system to create conditions for Hillsborough residents of all ages and in all sectors of the city—government, schools, business, etc—to make the connections between sustainability and learning together.

He’s convinced that if they can increase awareness and provide support, “the whole state can move the needle forward. We get to follow in the footsteps of others who went before us and be the next in line to grow this. It’s going to take knowledge, truth, and integrity to achieve our long-term mission.”

This “we are all in this together” orientation, fundamental to EfS, shows up in the team’s actions to make connections across sectors within their town and beyond

Hillsborough’s borders, too, as evidenced by the range of actions below:

• In town, Bill is applying to be on the energy council in the hopes of creating a nexus between agencies.
• Other members of the team are participating in the Citizens’ Campaign class for Citizen Legislators to parlay EfS more effectively in the government sector.
• At the same time, the team recently organized the Central Jersey Green Teams Best Practices Conference focusing on energy, transport, and recycling, and which was attended by about 65 people from more than ten municipalities.
• They applied for, and won, a “Green Maps” grant with Montgomery, Princeton, and Lawrence to map sustainability along that corridor.
• They have taken on an informal mentorship role with NJ Learns team from Jersey City, sharing their resources with the relatively less wealthy city to the north.

Press Release: The Cloud Institute Releases New EfS Standards

For Immediate Release

The Cloud Institute Releases New Education for Sustainability (EfS)
Standards and Performance Indicators

(New York, New York) - - The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, a non-profit organization and leader in the field of education for sustainability is, for the first time, making their EfS Standards and Performance Indicators available for free as a download.

The 14-page package of nine EfS core standards and performance indicators were developed for PreK-12 school systems, and are designed to equip teachers and students with the new knowledge and ways of thinking needed to achieve economic prosperity and responsible citizenship while restoring the health of our living systems.

The interdisciplinary content standards replace the traditional problem-based approach to learning with pedagogy that is aspiration-based. “Moving toward an aspiration offers a broader perspective and solves more than one problem at a time, while minimizing the creation of new ones,” says Jaimie P. Cloud, founder of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education. “Our standards promote greater awareness and sense of efficacy in students, and support teachers with a rich and highly flexible foundational system to educate for a sustainable future.”

The Department of Education has not approved a set of national standards for education for sustainability. This means that states, districts, and individual schools have an opportunity to enhance existing frameworks and curriculum by selecting the EfS Standards and Performance Indicators that are most closely aligned to their educational vision.

As part of The Cloud Institute’s teaching and learning system, these standards draw upon the most progressive fields of study - biomimicry, neuroscience, environmental ethics, systems thinking, and others - and have been aligned to Common Core, State Standards, Character Education, Cultural Competencies and Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The content is influenced by top leadership principles including The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics, Characteristics of Resiliency, Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick), and the attributes of catalytic or “quiet” leadership (David Rock).

The nine Core Content Standards are: Cultural Preservation and Transformation, Responsible Local and Global Citizenship, Dynamics of Systems and Change, Sustainable Economics, Healthy Commons, Natural Laws and Ecological Principles, Inventing and Affecting The Future, Multiple Perspectives and Sense Of Place.

According to Dr. Moira Wilkinson, The Cloud Institute’s Senior Director of Education and Research, “Any one of The Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards on their own, offer a valuable contribution to education. The nine core content standards that we promote, and the indicators that accompany them, are woven together to produce catalytic results. This collection is both comprehensive and rigorous, based on relevant and carefully selected fields of thought, and designed to integrate smoothly into existing programs.”

To learn more about the Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards and Performance Indicators and to download your free copy, visit /cloud-efs-standards

The Cloud Institute’s Education for Sustainability (EfS) Standards and Performance Indicator’s Q & A

Q. Who and what informed the development of these standards?

A.  Since 1987, Jaimie Cloud has been collecting and organizing opinions about the core competencies associated with being sustain-able on planet Earth.  Drawing from the literature and the work of selected scholars across a wide range of disciplines as well as her own experience educating for sustainability, The Cloud Institute’s EfS Standards and Performance Indicators have been developed, organized, tested, revised, and used to define the field and to design 21st century curriculum and systemic change, domestically and globally.  Our EfS Standards and Performance Indicators are informed by comprehensive research, drawing on publications and perspectives from the leading voices in the field of Education for Sustainability and complementary areas of study such as  Agenda 21 Chapter 36, the U.S. Task Force on Education for Sustainability, Robert Costanza, Herman Daly, Sabine O’Hara, Hazel Henderson, Fritjof Copra, Anne Perraca Bijur, Jack Byrne, Keith Wheeler, Jaimie Cloud, Karl Henrik Robert, Paul Mankiewicz, Julie Mankiewicz, Paul Ryan, Harland Cleveland, Edward DeBono, Buckminster Fuller, Garrett Harding, David Sobel, Paul Hawken, David Orr, Jean Perras, Peter Senge, Willard Kniep, Franziska Oswald, Lees Stuntz, Linda Booth Sweeney, Jonathan Rowe, Elinor Ostrom, Betty Sue Flowers, Wade Davis, Stephen Sterling, and Daniella Tilbury.

Q. Who is using them, how do they use them, and what difference are they making?

A. All Cloud Institute partners and clients, including districts, schools, and individuals, use our EfS Standards and Performance Indicators.  Now they are available to everyone.  Here is how we use them:  Once people gain a shared understanding of the meaning of sustainability and the attributes of Education for Sustainability, develop a personal rationale for why they should educate for sustainability, and become inspired and hopeful about contributing to sustainability through education, we introduce them to our Standards and Indicators so that educators and administrators may become familiar with, and align them to, their curriculum across grade levels and disciplines.  Then they all produce an integrated EfS curriculum map so everyone can access the big picture. No one teacher, grade level, discipline, course or unit does it all (though the richer the courses the more they can do). This is a collective effort. 

When alignment has been done, educators who are “early adopters” decide where to begin. They choose which unit they want to innovate and they choose the EfS Standard(s) and Performance Indicators that are appropriate for their students to address. They then embed the standards and indicators in their curriculum through a backwards design process. Understanding By Design (Wiggins) is a popular structure for this work.  With professional development and coaching from the Cloud Institute, they embed our EfS Standards and Indicators into their unit overviews, their assessments, their performance criteria and their lessons.  Over time, they look for evidence of them in student work.

Once the educators are ready to share their designs and exemplary student work samples, they “make the feedback visible, desirable, and doable,” and that inspires the next cohort of innovators, and so on.  In districts and schools that are ready and have administrative and organizational support, the time horizon for EfS to be the norm in curriculum and instruction is approximately 3-5 years.  Evidence shows that, over time, when districts and schools commit to EfS, they see concrete improvement in student learning and standards achievement, enhanced attitudes toward learning and students’ feelings of academic success.  Further, teachers report meaningful effects on their own attitudes and say that EfS helps both new and veteran teachers to achieve strong academic outcomes from their students.

Q. What Standards and Principles have these EfS Standards and Indicators been aligned to?

A. The Cloud Institute’s Standards and Indicators have been aligned to Common Core, State Standards, Character Education, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Cultural Competency, The Virtues, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, Systems Thinking and System Dynamics, Characteristics of Resiliency, Habits of Mind (Art Costa, Bena Kallick), and the attributes of catalytic or “quiet” leadership (David Rock).

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW & DOWNLOAD OUR EFS STANDARDS & INDICATORS

Cranford School District to Build Community Sustainability Team | By Glenn Eisenberg, The Cranford Chronicle

The Cranford school district has been selected by the Cloud Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustainability education, to receive funding for its “Education for Sustainability” program, in order to build a team of community volunteers who can work with the program.

The grant of $17,000 a year for the next three years, entitled “New Jersey Schools Learn,” was provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to the Cloud Institute, which then picked Cranford and two other school districts in New Jersey to pass the funding on to last spring. It will be used for professional development, curriculum development, and support resources through the team.

The Education for Sustainability program, which is run through the Cloud Institute, was pushed for by Cranford Environmental Commission member Mary Catherine Sudiak and the district’s Science Supervisor Lisa Hayeck, both of whom were trained by the Cloud Institute to facilitate the program.

Continue to NJ.com to read the full article

The Impossible Hamster

During our EfS Summer Design Studio, one of our participants shared this funny (and thought provoking) video with us.  The "Impossible Hamster" video, created by The New Economics Foundation (NEF), illustrates what would happen if there were no limits to growth.  The video confronts this topic head on, and puts a finger on a very important point--"As economic growth rises, we are pushing the planet ever closer to, and beyond some very real environmental limits."

We thought the video was worth sharing, and will hopefully spark a conversation.  What do you think about the Impossible Hamster?

Jaimie meets the Mayor of Cleveland, OH

On a recent visit to Cleveland, OH, where we are interested in launching a Sites Learn initiative, Jaimie attended the Schools that Can Conference and met with educators from across the city.  She also had the opportunity to meet with  Cleveland's Mayor, Frank G. Jackson, who in August 2009 convened the first ever Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Summit.  The Summit brought together hundreds of people interested in applying the principles of sustainability to the design of the local economy.

Learn more about Cleveland's sustainability plan here...

EfS in Schools (UK video)